Realising the potential of assessment
At its best, assessment can be transformative, helping a person understand the challenges they experience, identify ways to address them, and make informed decisions that support their goals. Too often, however, its potential is constrained by limitations of time, cost, and variable quality.
UDISAS grew from extensive professional experience of assessment and a belief that the process could become more consistent, accessible, and effective. Our platform reimagines how detailed information can be gathered, connected to relevant outcomes, and translated into practical support decisions.
A valuable process can still be improved
A well-conducted needs assessment can help someone articulate difficulties, discover relevant support, and feel better understood. Professional knowledge and conversation can be central to that experience.
Yet a fully assessor-led model can place information gathering, interpretation, explanation, documentation, and follow-up within a limited amount of professional time. UDISAS began with a practical question: which parts of the pathway need judgement and conversation, and which could be structured more dependably through technology?
People need time to reflect
Not everyone can identify, recall, and explain every relevant barrier within one appointment. A paced pathway can give people time to consider how different activities and circumstances affect them.
Activities should be explored systematically
A defined framework can help ensure that important areas are considered consistently while the route responds to the information each person provides.
Support choices should be self-determined
People can make confident support decisions when they can consider a full range of relevant options and have sufficient information to understand and compare them.
Professional time should be used purposefully
Repeatable information-gathering and documentation tasks can absorb time that may be more valuable for exploration, judgement, guidance, and personal contact.
Structure the process around the person
Translating the assessment process into a structured digital framework brings risks as well as benefits. Throughout the development of UDISAS, six key design principles have guided our work, helping us preserve what matters in assessment while using technology to make the process more consistent, accessible, and effective.
Start with lived experience
Explore how activities, environments, expectations, and barriers affect the person rather than assuming that a diagnosis explains everything.
Adapt the route
Use earlier responses to focus later questions while preserving a dependable underlying framework.
Create time for reflection
Allow people to progress at their own pace, revisit their circumstances, and consider how different parts of their experience connect.
Present relevant support
Make strategies available because they connect with the information gathered, not because they are routinely offered for a condition.
Keep the person involved
Provide enough explanatory information for people to compare available options before deciding what they wish to take forward.
Produce a bespoke record
Document barriers, selected support, and explanations of relevance in a form that is tailored to the individual, supporting later conversations.
Use each where it adds the most value
Technology can provide a repeatable structure for information gathering, responsive questioning, support exploration, and documentation.
Human expertise contributes the professional knowledge behind that structure and remains important wherever circumstances require interpretation, exploration, guidance, or an authorised decision.
Structured technology can support:
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A defined framework can help relevant areas be considered consistently while the route responds to the information each person provides.
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The pathway can use previous answers to present the next relevant questions and avoid unnecessary parts of the assessment.
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The platform can make connected strategies and solutions available with information that supports consideration.
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Assessment information and support selections can be assembled into a detailed, explainable report.
Human work adds value when:
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Professional judgement can help clarify what matters, what further information is needed, and how unusual circumstances should be understood.
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Conversation can explore context that a structured route should not attempt to resolve by assumption.
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An assessor or practitioner can help the person consider difficult choices, unsupported circumstances, or options outside the available pathway.
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The relevant person or body remains responsible for funding, adjustments, eligibility, clinical matters, policy, and other decisions assigned to them.
Beginning with the assessment experience, not the software
The thinking behind UDISAS grew through years of listening to people describe the barriers affecting their study and work, researching the support that might help, and seeing how much depends on the quality of the information gathered.
That experience prompted a sustained examination of which parts of needs assessment benefit most from professional conversation and judgement, and which could be made more dependable, accessible, and transparent through a structured digital pathway.
Professional practice
Robin Hodges conceived UDISAS and has led its design and development, drawing on 15 years of professional needs assessment experience and more than 4,500 completed assessments.
Detailed research
The framework has been informed by extensive research into disability, study contexts, assistive technology, and the ways that different support strategies can respond to identified barriers.
Multiple perspectives
Consultation with multiple needs assessors helped test important connections between user responses, identified needs, and relevant support outcomes against more than one practitioner's experience.
Choose the resource that matches your question
The Resources section is not a general archive. Each destination offers a different way to understand, evaluate, or use the information behind UDISAS.
Blog
Read ideas, research, professional reflection, and commentary on needs assessment, support provision, technology, and inclusion.
Frequently asked questions
Find concise answers to practical questions about UDISAS, the current Product Edition, and how the platform operates.